Cookie

I feel like I'm obligated to admit something now, rather than later. Many of my classmates will probably have blog posts that are short, sweet, and to the point. Regardless of whether I should have posts like that, I know I won't, because for better or for worse, I absolutely love to write.

I have a thing for rats. I know that most people who read that will probably shudder. But I really, really do. I love dogs as much as I love drawing, and I appreciate cats as well, but there's something special about my rats. It's that other people don't always like them. As characters, rats have the ability to be adorable, intelligent, terrifying, or repulsive. They can be underhanded villains or courageous heroes. Dogs and cats are partly defined by their typical personalities, but rats are a world of possibility.

So, that lead me to Cookie. An over sized, over glorified rodent. Last semester, I was given the daunting task of making a human character. If I wasn't given the option of anything four-legged or fuzzy, I had to take the next best thing - a child. I made a little girl, shy and timid, but imaginative and adventurous. She ran around diving off couches with a small plastic axe in one hand, and a terrified little rat named Cookie in the other. It was an affectionate, trembling, pint-sized creature, not too dissimilar from my rat when she's dragged around by my younger cousins.

That little girl, however, is tortured by nightmares. Each night she'd seek out the power of lucid dreaming, something that had taken on the face of a true magic in her world. The intention of the dream world is to be a bizarrely surreal mixture of things, with a tone that's a mildly uncomfortable mixture of cute and creepy. Perhaps I'll revisit it, and make a piece of concept art that could show the world better than I could ever explain it. For now though, the focus is on Cookie, and his drastically different appearance and personality in her little world. He's now a proud, fearless beast, with little notes of his real world personality.

For 260, all of my 3D focus is on him. Modeling, sculpting, painting, and weeks of animating. He looks like some odd concoction of lion, moose, and wolf - but once he moves, I want him to be nothing other than a rat. Hopping, scurrying, climbing, and squirming - I want to learn those quick, sudden movements just through pure observation. My first milestone is just the model, which went smooth enough for me to fear autodesk's future revenge.

The jaws as well - I decided to go with more canine/feline influenced teeth, because a rat's terrifyingly gruesome tooth (no, not teeth) just doesn't make much sense for a larger creature.

Hopefully, he'll be sculpted and painted soon enough. He's on schedule at the moment though.